Measuring invisible work in corporate E-Mail, anyone?
A long while ago, I was working on a program to identify the next big challenges in IT, and how to tackle them. It had multiple work streams, including collaboration and the tools we all tend to use to communicate in globally distributed teams.
One idea I proposed, but got not through the committee large corporations tend to form for such programs, was to investigate the number of unread E-Mail across all lines of business. All we agreed upon was, that “there is way too much E-Mail” (e.g. each corporate line of business had their own communication team, so many employees created “corporate news SPAM” filters and folders to tame the internal communications “fire hose”) and loads of “E-Mail that kills productivity” (like reply to all E-Mail cascades, Out of office cascades, external News letters, private Email, etc.)
At the time, I thought it should be easy to scan the Microsoft Exchange Servers and quantify the number of unread E-Mails per Employee, the number of attachments per unread E-Mail, and then qualify the E-Mail by number of unread auto-generated E-Mails, News letters, etc. But of course this idea is likely to create data privacy issues in some countries. So all statistics gathered must be anonymous.
Now, in the end we did not create an automated scanner, that would create a continuous report stream, but a survey and asked employees to let us know about their ability to get down to the bottom of their E-Mail inbox. How many E-Mails on average they receive, and some more questions, but the return of the survey was below 5% of the overall corporate population, and only covered one business unit, so was not representative at all.
Further, we sent an E-Mail asking employees to fill-in the survey on E-Mail.
Clearly, the latter did not reach those who already struggled to get to the bottom of their inbox. So the methodology used, already had a fundamental design flaw.
Anyway, in the light of business agility and lean flow optimization, corporate E-Mail is an arcane tool, that is used as workflow engine, and has the great disadvantage: It is a “push queue.” (And push queues tend to show almost all of the 8 Lean wastes (Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-Utilized Talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion and Extra Processing,see: https://www.phase5group.com/blog/learn-to-identify-the-eight-lean-wastes-and-eliminate-them)
Any worker can use E-Mail (evtl. with large attachments) to push work to another corporate worker’s E-Mail queue (aka inbox) and add a comment like “What do you think?” The worker then waits until he or she hears back. Now wait time is wasted time in the spirit of Lean. And all such E-Mails are invisible work.
Now, making invisible work visible is a recent trend in Lean, Agile, DevOps, and other methodologies to improve and optimize the (work) flow in a corporation, in order to deliver “value” faster.
I would therefore propose to anonymously collect data on unread E-Mail in your corporate environments, in order to take waste out of this push system of work. Which should boost productivity for many, drowning in E-Mail today.
Especially now, where companies rely on Cloud based E-Mail systems like Google’s G Suite, it should be trivial to generate the aforementioned statistics on unread E-Mail. And these could be easily added to an employee or CIO’s dashboard, displaying a company’s internal communication “health” status.
The more unread E-Mail, the unhealthier the communication status of your company.
According to a Google search, some folks have at least thought about this problem, and how it fits the 8 Lean Wastes, e.g. in 2011 “Solve your E-Mail Woes” by Alan Nicol https://www.inddist.com/article/2011/06/solve-your-email-woes-lean but it doesn’t seem there is a tool available as of today, which quantifies, qualifies and visualizes the problem.
Please feel free to point me to any (published or ongoing) research on this subject matter. I’d like to hear from you.
tl;dr
Jörg
p.s.: This is the 2nd of a series of Blog posts I intend to publish as a ebook in 2018 under the title “the_big1 — A Pioneer’s Adventures in Telecoms”
